Internet people

(1) People on the internet are not the norm. They are not necessarily not the norm either. However, there is an audience the internet acquires which overrepresents certain personality types.

(2) Most consummate internet users are hostile to accomplishment. They would rather play in the virtual world. And for them, it is play: there is no intended result. They will say or argue anything and everything to avoid facing this, even if we're only talking about a few keystrokes.

(3) People who have mental problems, whether biological or behavioral, are overrepresented on the internet, as are those who have not found any purpose in life.

(4) Many people come to the internet to feel good about themselves by putting other people down. It's a virtual world, and thus they view it like television: a way to make the ego feel better by belittling others as a form of "entertainment."

(5) No one can tell you're a dog on the internet -- or a loser who's secretly bitter.

(6) The above groups will more than anything else attack anyone who rises above their behavior.

It's the real world. With anonymity consequence fades, so responsibility seems to as well, but for those who think responsibility is solely based on undesirable consequence. If you are a certain way on the internet, that's how you are. It is what you become. Other people would be right to assume someone's words and actions reflect on them.

Their power is in their numbers. Someone misbehaves then gets booted. That one goes elsewhere and tells everyone such and such a place unfairly censors people for no reason. Then the moron flood of the usual social justice activists arrive to give you a thousandfold of the same problem as the first one. Who wins?

spot-on as usual. this is a topic in which I've invested a great deal of research, but I haven't the time to get into it properly right now. I can share one thing I've learned in my roughly 17 years online, and a fact that's only been crystallized by information shared on this forum: it's not the trolls, but the people who label others as trolls that are the problem. as the internet has increased in popularity and availability, the number of users with simplistic powers of reasoning has increased. these people are reflexively offended (read: intimidated) by anything that challenges them, so censorship and the casual mechanisms available to enforce it are highly appealing. hence trolling has become shorthand for any view that conflicts with the status quo.

spot-on as usual. this is a topic in which I've invested a great deal of research, but I haven't the time to get into it properly right now. I can share one thing I've learned in my roughly 17 years online, and a fact that's only been crystallized by information shared on this forum: it's not the trolls, but the people who label others as trolls that are the problem. as the internet has increased in popularity and availability, the number of users with simplistic powers of reasoning has increased. these people are reflexively offended (read: intimidated) by anything that challenges them, so censorship and the casual mechanisms available to enforce it are highly appealing. hence trolling has become shorthand for any view that conflicts with the status quo.

According to the study, Facebook is making us sad. Why? It's all about the kinds of pictures people to post on their pages.

Facebook photos generally depict smiling, cheerful people having good times, conveying a sense of happiness. Of course everyone likes to smile for the camera, so that good cheer may be inflated or false. As others view the photos, they may believe this conveyed sense of intense happiness is real, making them think that their friends are much happier than they are.

After controlling for race, gender, religious beliefs and whether the volunteers were unattached or in a relationship, the researchers saw a pattern: The more time students spent on Facebook, the more they thought others had it better than they did.

spot-on as usual. this is a topic in which I've invested a great deal of research, but I haven't the time to get into it properly right now. I can share one thing I've learned in my roughly 17 years online, and a fact that's only been crystallized by information shared on this forum: it's not the trolls, but the people who label others as trolls that are the problem. as the internet has increased in popularity and availability, the number of users with simplistic powers of reasoning has increased. these people are reflexively offended (read: intimidated) by anything that challenges them, so censorship and the casual mechanisms available to enforce it are highly appealing. hence trolling has become shorthand for any view that conflicts with the status quo.

You have been in discussion groups since 1994?

I've been using some variant of online discussion groups (newsgroups, irc, bulletin boards, etc.) since around June or July 1994. The biggest difference in those days was that the majority of users were in larger universities or had incomes large enough to sustain internet access. At that point, usage was limited to those "in the know," and it wasn't considered an inalienable right to have an online presence. Granted, places like Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL were largely cesspools, but discourse tended to be a bit more self-segregated than it is now. This forum bears a close resemblance to some of the more functional outposts back in the mid-to-late '90s.